👋 Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.
📖 As I’ve mentioned, when it comes to Covid–19, it seems we’re in for a marathon, not a sprint. And I recently figured: what nonfiction books out there best explain pandemics?
You know, since viruses that sweep over the world are not exactly new?
So, I consulted several best-of lists. Here are some titles that come highly recommended:
“The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus,” by Richard Preston (1995)
“The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World,” by Steven Johnson (2006)
“March began amid an 11-year expansion and ended with blue-chip companies begging for bailouts. Swift and sharp, the pandemic cut through the country’s commerce like nothing before it.”
“’Unlike in a lot of places near urban areas, I’m not worried about the trailhead being overrun,’ he said. ’It’s very easy to keep six feet, if not three miles, between me and the next person.’”
“Why am I streaming fictional end-of-the-world stories during a real pandemic? Maybe because, as psychologist Christina Scott told me, they’re ‘the only reference point we have.’”
“So I thought I would reach out to the world’s leading expert on the art of nothing: the endlessly irascible man whose mantra has always been: “It doesn’t pay to leave your house — what’s the point?””
“A tiger at the Bronx Zoo has tested positive for the new coronavirus, in what is believed to be the first known infection in an animal in the U.S. or a tiger anywhere, federal officials and the zoo said Sunday.”
“You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can’t control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.” – Marcus Aurelius
👋 Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.
In last week’s NN I shared some basic steps to lessen coronavirus-related risk, along with some perspective on what life is like here in Hong Kong.
🗞️ This week I want to share a helpful method for staying on top of coronavirus-related news – in a way that preserves your sanity.
It’s decidedly low-tech.
It’s not a social media platform or a messaging app.
📧 It’s email. One per day. From the newspaper (or newspapers) of your choosing.
First off: if you already subscribe to a newspaper, thanks for supporting quality journalism. If you get it in print, just keep reading it every day, like always. You can skip below to this week’s links.
If you’re a digital subscriber, or don’t subscribe to any papers, read on…
🔑 Remember how, even though we had round-the-clock TV news coverage after September 11th, daily newspapers helped sort out the most important events of the previous 24 hours? You could ignore TV news. There was no social media. The paper was pretty much all you needed.
It’s the same today, really.
Just get papers’ daily headlines deliverd to your inbox. Here are a few I consume every day. And yes, I am employed by the first one on this list, and read dozens and dozens of WSJ stories every day, but I always look to see what made it into the day’s paper.
(Even if you’re not a paying subscriber, all three are offering core coronavirus-related coverage for free.)
The Wall Street Journal: In Today’s Paper (sign up here)
The New York Times: Today’s Headlines (sign up here]
The Washington Post: Today’s Headlines (sign up here)
I bet your local newspaper has a newsletter, too. Sign up for it.
I’m not saying you should stay away from cable TV, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube during these fraught times. (Though it probably wouldn’t hurt.) But if you’re finding the incessant streams and feeds and alerts from those platforms just too much, turn to newspapers – delivered to your inbox – instead.
I promise: they won’t miss any of the big stories. And the news will be delivered to you in a much more measured way.
Oyo Hotels and Homes, which built itself into the world’s second-biggest hotel chain by total number of rooms, is phasing out an important tool that fueled its rise.
That unusual tool is guaranteed revenue for hotel owners who sign up to Oyo’s platform. And there’s friction in Japan, China, India, and the U.S. Click through to read on.
Here are ten items (mostly big-picture coronavirus-related reads) worth your time this week:
“In this time of crisis, we face two particularly important choices. The first is between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. The second is between nationalist isolation and global solidarity.”
“For those of us living through these stay-at-home days of Covid–19, it’s useful to look back and see how much has changed – and how much hasn’t. Humanity has been guarding against plagues and surviving them for thousands of years, and we have managed to learn a lot along the way.”
“In many Asian countries, everyone is encouraged to wear masks, and the approach is about crowd psychology and protection. If everyone wears a mask, individuals protect each other, reducing overall community transmission. The sick automatically have one on and are also more likely to adhere to keeping their mask on because the stigma of wearing one is removed.”
“The photographs here all tell a similar story: a temple in Indonesia; Haneda Airport in Tokyo; the Americana Diner in New Jersey. Emptiness proliferates like the virus.”
“As coronavirus infections have rapidly climbed over the past week, doctors and citizens are turning to low-cost methods to try to protect its 1.3 billion-strong populace.”
“‘After scrapping that idea, I was still a bit bored, playing with the magnets. It’s the same logic as clipping pegs to your ears – I clipped them to my earlobes and then clipped them to my nostril and things went downhill pretty quickly when I clipped the magnets to my other nostril.’”
“‘I think dogs are thrilled to have their humans around more often,’ said psychologist Laurie Santos, director of the Canine Cognition Center at Yale University, in an email (though she cautioned that there are no direct studies to confirm that claim at the moment).”
“John Krasinski highlights some good news from around the world, including an interview with Steve Carell to mark the 15thanniversary of THE OFFICE, as well as John’s newest hero Coco. ”
“Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it has been said, it is the quality which guarantees all others.” — Winston Churchill
👋 Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.
With the coronavirus now spreading across the globe, I hope everyone is safe and healthy. And I trust you are doing what you’re no doubt sick of hearing you should be doing:
washing your hands (think you’re doing it right? Watch this),
practicing social distancing,
wearing a facial mask when around others,
looking after those who need help, and
taking steps to protect your own health in simple ways (eating healthy food, getting enough sleep, exercising).
🇭🇰 Here in Hong Kong, the city’s 7.4 million residents have been grappling with the coronavirus since January. There have been more than 270 coronavirus cases and four deaths.
Some people are working from home. Some are going into the office. Many have no choice but to be out and about, working in restaurants or in shops, or for the government.
Many people are juggling work and family demands (here’s a thoughtful piece on the subject by a WSJ colleague).
😷 Nearly everyone you see out in the streets is wearing a facial mask. People are still taking the subway and riding busses and trolleys, but they’re less crowded than usual.
People are still having picnics, going for hikes, shopping for food.
And they’re also eating out (sans masks). Most restaurants are still fairly crowded in the evenings. Some will take your temperature to make sure you’re not running a fever, take down your name, mobile number and email address, and ask you to confirm you haven’t traveled abroad in recent weeks.
But life continues. Things just take more time to do. People are more cautious. In one month here, however, I have yet to see a single person lose his or her temper in public due to a coronavirus-related issue. After all: Folks here lived through SARS more than 15 years ago.
As the saying goes: It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
With the coronavirus pandemic pummeling global travel, some hotels are employing a new tactic to boost bookings: targeting guests who face lengthy quarantines.
The risky strategy is a reaction to the unprecedented challenge that the world’s hospitality companies now face, with few people traveling and few likely to do so for some time.
And some local color from Hong Kong:
At the Dorsett Wanchai, which describes itself as “a 4.5 star hotel,” a reservations employee said the hotel was receiving dozens of inquiries a day about its 14-day quarantine package. For 9,688 Hong Kong dollars ($1,248), or about $89 per night, guests can book a “Premier Room” with a window that can be opened to let in fresh air, an unusual feature for high-rise hotels in the semiautonomous Chinese city.
Here are ten (nearly all Coronavirus-related, and actually this week more than ten) items worth your time this week:
📈 1) For a continuously updated feed of the most important global coronavirus news, see The WSJ’s dedicated page: wsj.com/livecoverage/coronavirus. Much of our core coronavirus coverage is free for all to read.
The global spread of the novel coronavirus is accelerating rapidly, with cases of infection doubling in a week to top 300,000 Sunday, pointing to the increasing challenges for governments world-wide as they lock down more people and shut borders.
“It first struck me how different it was when I saw my first coronavirus patient go bad. I was like, Holy shit, this is not the flu. Watching this relatively young guy, gasping for air, pink frothy secretions coming out of his tube.”
“While the virus was quietly spreading within the U.S., the CDC had told state and local officials its ‘testing capacity is more than adequate to meet current testing demands,’ according to a Feb. 26 agency email viewed by The Wall Street Journal.”
“‘The best-case scenario is that we have vaccine in 12 or 18 months and then our lives go back to normal,’ Jit said. ‘The worst-case scenario it takes a long time for a vaccine to be developed, and the world is really changed and our lives aren’t the same again.’”
“A recession is now all but certain, according to a Wall Street Journal survey of 34 economists, which projects a downturn that would last months at least, and would in some ways rival – and possibly even surpass – the severity of the 2007–09 slump triggered by the housing collapse and subprime loan debacle.”
"Some commentators have argued that the coronavirus panic is nothing like the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 because, unlike today, policy makers knew exactly what they were doing back then. That’s nonsense. Monetary and political leaders navigated that time not with foresight but with a jury-rigged blend of bluffing, analysis, tinkering, bickering, guesswork and luck. Don’t let yourself be fooled into believing it’s unusual that nobody knows what’s going on right now."
Well, I’m a scientist, but I’m also a person of faith. And I can’t ever look at something without asking the question of isn’t there a higher power that in some way will help us to be the best version of ourselves that we could be?"
👋 Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.
“U.S. stocks careened on Monday, pushing major indexes closer to bear-market territory as a price war for oil and the fallout from the coronavirus frightened investors, who sought shelter in government bonds and propelled yields to unprecedented lows.”
“China’s errors, dating back to the very first patients, were compounded by political leaders who dragged their feet to inform the public of the risks and to take decisive control measures ”
“News about the coronavirus outbreak that started in Wuhan, China, is changing rapidly. Our team of experts are here to break down what we know and how you can stay safe.”
“As the coronavirus spreads in the United States and tech companies ask their workforces to do their jobs from home, some in the industry are looking at the outbreak as a test case for the long-gestating but never-arriving moment when working remotely will broadly replace working in person.”
“…GB WhatsApp, the most widely used WhatsApp mod across major African markets, allows users operate multiple accounts, restore deleted messages and send and receive larger media files (up to 50 megabytes compared to 16 megabytes on WhatsApp). ”
“By nature, buffets attract the very customers they wish to avoid: Big eaters with insatiable appetites. Buffets seek to ‘fill the customer’s belly as cheaply and as quickly as possible.’ To do so, they employ a number of research-backed tricks to get people to eat less food…”
“’The bad news is that we see the first signs of brain aging much earlier than was previously thought. However, the good news is that we may be able to prevent or reverse these effects with diet, mitigating the impact of encroaching hypometabolism by exchanging glucose for ketones as fuel for neurons.’”
This is Kratu’s last year at Crufts before retirement, and he made it count, getting up to his old tricks of sniffing and hiding in tunnels and general waywardness before pulling off a spectacular heist right before our eyes.
💡 Quote of the week:
"Don’t stumble over something behind you.” – Unknown
👋 Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.
🇭🇰 Big news on the personal front: Anasuya and I have moved here to Hong Kong!
Hi from HK!
Yes!
It’s true!
Hong Kong!
Our three and a half years in India were extremely rewarding. Now it’s time for a new adventure. We are thrilled to be here.
😷 (What’s Hong Kong like, given the coronavirus? So far it’s similar to when I’ve visited before, except that 1) fewer folks seem to be out in public, so the streets are less crowded; 2) the vast majority of people are wearing face masks when they’re on the streets and especially on public transportation, though most people in bars and restaurants aren’t wearing them.)
✍️ As I mentioned on Twitter, I’ll be covering – much like I did from New Delhi – U.S. tech titans and their battles across Asia. It is a beat I have loved exploring from New Delhi and look forward to continuing to write about from this new perch.
🐕 Oh, and since I know many NN readers are fans of Ginger, our beloved New Delhi street dog, I will say this: fret not. She is also, of course, joining us here in HK soon. More on that soon!
Health officials are focused on a cluster of confirmed cases in Washington, including the two deaths. Those infections, and several others in states such as Oregon and California – many with no clear path to exposure – signal that there might be wider spread of the virus in some communities, with many cases still undiagnosed. New cases were also reported in New York, Florida and Rhode Island.
“Public health experts advise staying calm and following the same precautions recommended for preventing flu or any other respiratory virus. Stick with the basics: Wash your hands, cover your coughs and sneezes, and stay at home from work or school when you’re sick.”
"Throughout history, diseases have posed an unsparing test of political leaders and their fidelity to the facts. According to Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan, ’From the political to the purely mercenary, secrecy has almost always contributed to the further spread of a pandemic and hindered public health management.’”
Officials will have to act when they do not have all the facts, because much about the virus is unknown. A broad guess is that 25–70% of the population of any infected country may catch the disease. China’s experience suggests that, of the cases that are detected, roughly 80% will be mild, 15% will need treatment in hospital and 5% will require intensive care.
His rise to the top of SoftBank Group Corp.’s $100 billion Vision Fund isn’t a traditional tale of corporate ladder-climbing. He succeeded, in part, by striking at two of his main rivals inside SoftBank with a dark-arts campaign of personal sabotage.
The tactics included planting negative news stories about them, concocting a shareholder campaign to pressure SoftBank to fire them and even attempting to lure one of them into a “honey trap” of sexual blackmail, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
“‘Life begins at 55, the age at which I published my first book,’ he wrote in ‘From Eros to Gaia,’ one of the collections of his writings that appeared while he was a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study – an august position for someone who finished school without a Ph.D. The lack of a doctorate was a badge of honor, he said.”
“An organization called Vista Group recently uploaded dozens of VHS and cassette tapes from the 90s and early 2000s to the Internet Archive, and the content within is worth a retro-nostalgia trip back to a simpler, weirder, more wavy time.”
“I’m not sure why I resisted this sonic refuge for so long. With advances in noise-cancelling tech and Bluetooth’s ease of connectivity with smart TVs, soundbars and streaming devices like Apple TV, headphoned TV fans don’t have to worry about intrusive noise.”
“Poolside FM was conceived one awfully rainy summer in the Highlands of Scotland – a virtual vacation, if you will. The audio and video streams are curated to inject a healthy dose of serotonin into your brain.”
👋 Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.
🚨 Recently out, some sad news from Thailand: A soldier yesterday (Saturday) went on shooting spree in Nakhon Ratchasima, a city northeast of Bangkok, killing more than 20 people and wounding dozens.
A soldier with a grudge gunned down 26 people and wounded 57 in Thailand’s worst mass shooting before he was fatally shot inside a mall in the country’s northeast on Sunday, officials said.
“The deadly rampage has shocked Thailand, where gun violence isn’t uncommon but mass shootings are very rare,” my WSJ colleagues write.
⚠️ Note: There will be no NN next week. Look for the next edition in your inboxes the following Sunday. On to this week’s NN…
"China has quarantined entire cities, thrown up hospitals in days, and deployed military doctors and Communist Party members to the front lines, a massive effort Mr. Xi likens to a military campaign.
That effort is intended to beat the coronavirus outbreak, and also win a battle on a second front – against the most intense volleys of public rage since he took power in 2012."
“The Trump administration has bought access to a commercial database that maps the movements of millions of cellphones in America and is using it for immigration and border enforcement, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.”
“A few weeks in, though, it occurred to me that if someone like me could pull off a digital heist, it would function as a sort of hacking Turing test, proof that cybercrime had advanced to the point where software-aided ignorance would be indistinguishable from true skill. As a journalist, I’ve spent years writing about people who do things that I, if called upon, couldn’t do myself. Here was my chance to be the man in the arena.”
“‘There are only TWO companies that make lacquers in the world, and the other, MDC in Japan, already had trouble keeping up with demand BEFORE this development.’”
“My parents, Russian immigrants who graciously embraced my career path, were able to help me financially in small ways – a car, my books. And James Franco was in my program. He smelled nice and only attended every other class.”
👋 Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.
The most popular music streaming service in India, the world’s biggest untapped digital economy, isn’t from Spotify Technology SA or Apple Inc. Instead, it is a local rival little known outside the country.
Noida, India-based Gaana, named after the Hindi word for “song,” has used a hyperlocal approach and cut-rate pricing to beat the competition and attract 152 million monthly users. That is more than half of Spotify’s global user base, double Apple Music’s global count and far more than YouTube Music and Amazon.com Inc.’s music services.
“The Super Bowl isn’t just a football game. It’s the halftime show; it’s the ads; it’s the seven-layer dip; it’s the fact that, for four hours on Sunday night, nobody is expected to be doing anything else.”
And:
“With the Patriots absent for the first time since 2016, Super Bowl LIV feels like the dawn of a new era. Patrick Mahomes leads a pass-heavy Chiefs attack against the NFL’s best defense, while Jimmy Garoppolo leads a 49ers offense that has run the ball on 71 of its last 88 plays.”
“…beyond any specific attributes of the technology, there is a particular group of actors that benefits from the idea that measuring and computationally analyzing the world affords access to knowledge – and those actors also have the power to enact and legitimize their knowledge claims.”
“…in Donald Trump’s Washington, Warner has evolved into Capitol Hill’s most reluctant and thoughtful tech critic, grilling Facebook, Twitter, and Google executives, lashing out in private and public over their intransigence, and pressing the companies to confront the role their platforms have played in undermining democracy.”
“Russia’s largest technology company, Yandex NV, is getting groceries to Moscow homes within a quarter of an hour, free of charge. Its new online service, called Lavka, has spread small warehouses across the capital stocked with about 2,000 items and uses bike couriers to deliver orders.”
“Mary Higgins Clark, the tireless and long-reigning “Queen of Suspense” whose tales of women beating the odds made her one of the world’s most popular writers, died Friday at age 92.”
“99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic.”
“Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.” – Albert Einstein
👋 Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.
🙏🏻 Apologies for the tardiness of this week’s edition. There’s been a lot of news here in India this week. To wit, I’ve had three stories out in recent days:
India’s antitrust watchdog ordered a probe into whether Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc.’s Flipkart have violated competition laws, New Delhi’s latest move to try to rein in American tech giants that dominate its burgeoning internet economy.
An Indian court ordered Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp and Alphabet Inc.’s Google to preserve data connected to an attack on a university campus earlier this month in the latest attempt by authorities in the country to wrangle more control over the messaging and search giants.
On Wednesday, Mr. Bezos praised U.S.-India ties and said he believes the 21st century “is going to be the Indian century.” At the end of his talk, the executive, dressed in an indigo Nehru jacket, clasped his hands together and bowed before the crowd to great applause.
After touching down in New Delhi on Tuesday, Mr. Bezos posted a video on his Twitter account showing him paying tribute at a memorial to Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi.
⚠️ Editor’s note: I will be tied up over the coming days, so the next NN will land in your inbox the weekend of Feb. 1.
“Facebook Inc. is backing away from efforts to sell ads in WhatsApp, in a retreat from a controversial plan that drove the creators of the popular messaging service to resign more than 18 months ago, according to people familiar with the matter.”
“Oh, what a difference 12 months makes. At last year’s CES, we found fewer concepts and more tangible products than ever before. Apparently this year, the exhibitors saw our reaction and felt they had to work overtime to correct it because if there was a theme to 2020’s CES, it was that CES is the land of the concept.”
“Neil Peart, the pyrotechnical drummer and high-concept lyricist for the Canadian progressive-rock trio Rush, died on Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 67.”
“Female filmmakers were shut out, ‘Parasite’ made history and ‘Joker’ edged out ‘The Irishman,’ ‘1917’ and ‘Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood’ in Monday’s Oscar nominations.”
“Unlike the biohacks that the other gurus are out there selling, these are all-natural. I call them – and I insist on the capitalization here – NATURAL BIOHACKS .”
“Author and artist José Naranja ensures he won’t forget any detail of his year-round travels across the globe through a meticulous and unique documentation process.”
👋 Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.
TLDR: My pics include books about tech giants such as Airbnb, Uber and Google; titles on economic development and Indian billionaires; a true spy story from the Cold War; and a sprinkling of classic fiction…
What memorable books did you read last year? Hit reply and let me know.
Here are ten items worth your time this week:
🔮 1) A 2013 longread that’s been doing the rounds given recent events: The Shadow Commander [The New Yorker)]
“Qassem Suleimani is the Iranian operative who has been reshaping the Middle East. Now he’s directing Assad’s war in Syria.”
“The OPM hack was a watershed moment, ushering in an era when big data and other digital tools may render methods of traditional human intelligence gathering extinct, say former officials.”
“I have a new paper available on request showing that happiness is U-shaped in age minimizing at around age fifty in 132 countries – here it is for Europe from 1.2 million observations.”
“By recognizing it and overriding our innate responses, we can break destructive patterns, make smarter decisions, see the world more realistically and also exploit the benefits of this bias. Bad is stronger than good, but good can prevail if we know what we’re up against.”
“In German, certain words exist that describe some of our human experiences so accurately and precisely that I’ve marveled at how much helps us to express ourselves.”
🐕 10) Dog-related video of the week: A Jenga-playing canine [Steve Stewart-Williams/Twitter]
“Holy crap, this is incredible: A dog playing Jenga. Turn-taking, fine motor control, apparent understanding of the aim of the game. I would not have guessed a dog could do this.”
💡 Quote of the week:
“If you have good habits, time becomes your ally. You just need to be patient. You just need to let that compounding process work for you. But if you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy.” – James Clear
👋 Hi, friends. Welcome to the latest edition of Newley’s Notes, a weekly newsletter containing my recent Wall Street Journal stories, must-read links on tech and life, and funny dog videos.
For this week’s NN, I’ve put together a special best-of-the best-of–2019 lists. Read on for a meta-guide to top picks for books, music, TV shows, movies and more!
But first: a couple of my stories to share from yesterday (Monday):
🇮🇳 – And second, from the wider world of India politics, a story yesterday with my colleague Krishna Pokharel: Protests Over India’s New Citizenship Law Widen<– Watch this space. It’s a developing situation.
